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“... a collection which, like Gulbenkian’s own, had been shaped by the excellent eye of Howard Carter. Six weeks earlier Carter had opened the burial chamber of Tutankhamun in front of the world’s press, with Carnarvon, the expedition’s sponsor, in proud attendance. Gulbenkian suspected that if anyone knew the fate of Carnarvon’s ...”

“... and on society. Any orthodox novel reader, picking up this excellent new translation by Richard Howard, would be stimulated into a desire to read further: On May 15, 1796, General Bonaparte entered Milan at the head of that young army which had lately crossed the Lodi bridge and taught the world that after so many centuries Caesar and Alexander had a ...”

“... are the two surviving members of the Tabloid troika, Pete Bondurant and Ward Littell. Pete is a French-Canadian immigrant of enormous size and strength whose former occupations include freelance entrapment and extortion, procuring girls and drugs for Howard Hughes, killing people for Jimmy Hoffa, and training Cuban ...”

“... of heterosexual love. Jack figures the Kirkus reviewer must be a woman, probably studying French, unduly influenced by Will’s touched-up author photo. Then comes a review in the New York Times, which begins by commending the novel for its ‘exact’ and ‘shimmering’ prose and its ‘well-observed’ characters, but adds that ‘some readers may ...”

“... of an Eel’. And then the rabbits began to appear.A local apothecary and obstetrician, John Howard, was the first person outside her immediate circle to examine Toft. He said he felt something ‘leaping’ in her womb. Under his supervision in Guildford, she went on to deliver a large number of dead rabbits, nine in a single day. ...”

“... stage-manage his exit. He even invites his biographer to accompany him and his longtime companion Howard Austen as they stroll through Washington’s Rock Creek Park Cemetery to pick out burial plots. Kaplan accepts, crafting his own angle. If Vidal expires before he completes his book, he reasons, he can use this tour as material. ‘It is one of the rewards ...”

“... in 1601, was to produce a tract which would demonstrate the claim of the English ambassador at the French court to precedence over the Spanish ambassador. Mr Sharpe (who creditably resists temptation) remarks that ‘the political thought of Elizabethan antiquarianism was well summarised’ in the pamphlet Cotton produced: ‘The English nation commanded ...”

“... that neither he nor Balzac had written or would ever write: best described, I think, as an early French draft, the Enlightenment’s version, of what would become James’s Portrait of a Lady. It is a novel about the adventures of the intelligence – as distinct from the conscience or the will – in a world which fears intelligence above all things. Mina ...”

“... means and motives and varieties of guilt, and with European (or rather, English and to some extent French) perceptions of the United States. And it is in this respect that the film differs most interestingly from the book. Various changes have inevitably been made, the most significant of which is the necessary absence of a first-person narrative – perhaps ...”

“... writer. Much of the recent debate has centred on that ‘reason’. But unlike Catherine Howard, the other Henrician wife to get the chop, and Jane Seymour, who died giving birth to the badly needed male heir which this whole story, at one level, was about, Anne Boleyn was no Tudor bimbo, no mindless cipher. Rather, she was ‘the most influential ...”

“... us a Note. ‘Adrian is making this too heavy and Germanic,’ he said. ‘I want it to be light, French, a soufflé.’ This confused us performers and wrecked the show. Later in life, Codron became more expert at giving Notes. He appears in Hall’s diary instructing him (by telegram) to release Stuart Burge from the National Theatre to work at the Royal ...”

“... of confidence as they stretch for snazzy English renditions of Simenon’s enigmatically blunt French. Pietr-le-Letton from 1931 was first translated in 1933 – note that English publishers were onto Maigret pretty quickly – as Suite at the Majestic. That same translation became The Strange Case of Peter the Lett, then The Case of Peter the Lett. In ...”

“... other films, a more or less obligatory practice these days. Giles’s mad mother lives at Castle Howard (a.k.a. Brideshead), and at one point Johnny the psycho is about to blow the lock off a door with a shotgun when he thinks better of it and instead smashes in one of the panels with a handy statuette of the Virgin. He then fools the audience by not ...”

“... They Fall – Bogart’s final film – and after a moment growls ‘Bogie’ in American-accented French. Before I viewed that breathless moment, I was too young to have seen or wanted to see an actual Bogart movie, and not enough time had yet passed for Bogart to become an emblem of another period. After A bout de souffle, I went to all the NFT’s regular ...”

“... and Jane’s is one of them. She was beheaded in 1542, with Henry VIII’s fifth queen, Catherine Howard. She was one of Catherine’s ladies, and for reasons which remain inaccessible to us, she had helped the dizzy little person carry on a love affair with a courtier, Thomas Culpepper. She passed on letters and misled and misdirected Catherine’s other ...”